Denis Smith worked in the charter school office of the Ohio Department of Education. He knows the problems of oversight of these deregulated schools.
In this post, he proposes 10 reforms to rein in corruption and malfeasance in Ohio’s charter sector.
The major reform that is needed is financial transparency. All schools–public and charter–should be subject to public audit.
Most of his recommendations focus on the misuse of public funds, for example, to pay for celebrity endorsements and advertising.
Here are his top three recommendations:
“#3: Administrative qualifications. Incredibly, there are no minimum educational or professional licensure requirements for charter school administrators. This situation needs to be addressed immediately if all charter reform efforts are to be viewed as substantive. After all, school is about education.
“#2: Citizenship requirement. In traditional school districts, board members have to be qualified voters – citizens – in order to serve as overseers of public funds. News reports in the last year have focused on one charter school chain where some of the board members and administrators may not be American citizens. If charter proponents want to emphasize the word public in the term public charter school, they should also agree that requiring American citizenship for board members is a no-brainer for the charter industry.
“And the Number One Needed Charter School Reform –
“Get the money out!
“The influence of charter moguls David Brennan and William Lager on the Ohio Republican party is well-known. Money talks, and in charter world, money speaks loudly. Public funds – the profits gained from running privately operated schools with public money – should not be allowed to unduly influence legislators. The fact that HB 2 stalled at the very time that another $91,726 arrived to replenish state Republican campaign coffers is no coincidence.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s interesting and those are all good ideas (although none of them but one are in the legislation they didn’t pass) but I just think it’s a shame that no one on in Columbus is at all interested in the 93% of Ohio public school students who don’t attend charter schools.
That’s ludicrous even if you’re a charter school zealot. It’s nuts.
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Just reform the charter schools. Public school reform is not required or is forbidden.
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The charter school system invites corruption which makes costly, continued, enforcement inescapable.
Scarce tax dollars should be spent on student learning, not on investigative teams, litigators and police for recovery. One-half of Ohio’s state auditor’s budget for investigations, goes solely to document, charter school fraud for potential court cases and recovery.
Unlike charters, Ohio public schools have a checks and balance system that reduces wrong doing (all possible variations), to a minimum.
Charter schools are a money making scheme that fleeces taxpayers in two ways. First, when tax dollars are misused or stolen and secondly, when the taxpayer has to absorb the cost of trial, recovery and incarceration.
The consequences to students of a failed charter school system are borne by society. And, once-again, our tax dollars will be used to right the wrongs of Wall Street and of profiteering, corrupt opportunists hawking a product failure.
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Are you saying that there is no corruption in public schools?
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Are you saying there is no corruption?
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That is not the point. But some people like you do not care because they live in a totally different la la land.
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I’m shocked–shockef!
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Plunderbund reported today that students arrived at a Columbus charter school, which enrolls 300 students, and found a note on the door, of the empty building. It’s reported that the charter received $184,000, on July 9 and, $211,000, on Aug. 12, for the 2015-16 school year.
How and why are other schools expected to find places for these students, without advance notice or money? The students are unable to get their records to transfer, further delaying their opportunity to learn.
I hold the Buckeye Institute, Fordham, Students First Ohio, the Alliance of Ohio Charter Schools, Bill Gates and the Waltons responsible. They are the high profile promoters of a failed free market education debacle.
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